Sparking a change in Hollywood: Annual visual effects festival focuses on burgeoning world of virtual reality

Interstellar was one of the movies that Ian Hunter of New Deal Studio will discuss at this week’s SPARK (FWD) 2015 annual visual effects festival and conference in Vancouver.Photo by

Director Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar is a multiple Academy Award-nominee at this year’s Oscars and a very likely winner in the Best Visual Effects category.

When he comes to this week’s SPARK (FWD) 2015 annual visual effects festival and conference in Vancouver, Ian Hunter of New Deal Studios will discuss bringing Nolan’s unique visions to the silver screen.

The California-based studio has plenty of experience with the challenges in Nolan’s films.

“Having worked on four of his movies, I will be explaining how — in pretty simple terms — you go about pulling off something that’s almost impossible, because Nolan doesn’t shy away from big ideas,” says Hunter. “The process of planning, testing and developing the shots and then executing them in the Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Inception and Interstellar, to get that seamless realistic flow has been fascinating. Interstellar was the biggest involvement for us on any of his films.”

New Deal Studios opened in 1995 and has been dedicated to envelope pushing productions all along. Besides Interstellar and such blockbusters as The Avengers and Hugo, Hunter says the other big focus is on the burgeoning world of virtual reality (VR) cinematic experiences. The company premièred a number of VR-based shorts at Sundance this year, such as Jaunt VR’s Kaiju Fury and The Mission. New Deal’s resident VR ace, Matthew Gratzner, will lead a panel at the conference on the coming VR explosion.

“We’re heavily trying to figure it out, promote it, come up with a pipeline, break the cameras; get it all going,” he says. “The thing is that the players such as Oculus Rift and others are coming online much faster than content that is story- driven — such as documentaries, concerts, travelogues and the like — as opposed to the obvious gaming applications.

“Remember that IMAX began as 20-minute experiences because it was felt that it was too intense to put up with a full-length feature and we’re feeling out what that reality is with VR.”

Hunter goes on to speculate about whether the VR future will be serialized shows you can exit and re-enter as they go along or feature-length films. Amusingly, in all of this tech talk is the truth of Interstellar’s awesome effects: Good old-fashioned models, lighting and camera tricks.

“People keep on congratulating us on the amazing CGI in specific scenes and we have to tell them ‘gee, that is actually a physical thing being filmed,’ ” he says. “We begin with a 3D rendering and use it to layout how we are going to go from initial design, to study model, to build and how to shoot it. Once it’s finalized, we build using everything from traditional means to fairly modern techniques like 3D printing, laser cutting and so forth to create the components to be cast.”

The spaceship Endurance is a centrepiece of Interstellar and the main scale model measured 14 feet from top to bottom which was as big as it could be and still fit on the sound stage. Then subsequent models could be built down from that original scale so that shots could be seamlessly blended together. Needless to say, there is an awful lot of math involved in the procedure.

Hunter says that much of the delight in making the models was in incorporating design concepts that not only paid some homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but also to NASA designs through the decades.

“There was a lot of reference to the Saturn 5, to the space shuttle and all that was meant to make it all the more believable,” he says. “Shooting a real model under real lights gave the whole thing this simple, utilitarian feel which made it more real to the audience and fit the storyline.”

Having come from early film treatments and modelling to contemporary digital scenes, Hunter says it still always comes back to selling the audience on what’s on the screen. Citing the black hole in Interstellar based on a 3D rendering engine incorporating the latest science, he says that the CGI side can be equally organic when the effort’s put in.

Besides Hunter’s talk, other Spark (FWD) 2015 panels include a look back at the concepts put forward in Back to the Future, Ara Khanikian of Canada’s Rodeo FX will discuss the company’s work on Birdman or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance and others will discuss Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Game of Thrones, The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies and more. A highlight will certainly be Matt Krentz and David Seager of Vancouver (and London)-based Moving Picture Company going over the big budget Marvel action flick Guardians of the Galaxy.

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